Chapter 10 Marriage, intimacy and adulthood in disabled people’s lives and activism in twentieth-century Britain¹

Intimate testimonials

The musings and concerns of policymakers and medical practitioners can be relatively easily seen in historical archives; the experiences and desires of disabled people are much less well represented. Their hopes for intimacy, their experiences of love and sexual (dis)satisfaction, and their marriages were sometimes recorded in the memoirs and diaries which describe their experiences in the decades after 1925. Most of these were organised around narratives stressing personal adversity and courage in tackling it – at least this is how reviewers and publishers routinely presented them. The public had an appetite for sensational stories of poverty and bodily difference, and many such memoirs also reflected on faith as a source of resilience.¹⁶ George Thomas’s A Tenement in Soho described his impoverished family of seven, of whom four experienced muscular dystrophy and were mostly confined to their home or bed. This made intimate relationships extending beyond the family difficult, though the family were notably emotionally close. In his forties, Thomas married a penfriend – unusually, the couple did not meet in person before becoming engaged, and their correspondence and courtship were closely mediated by their shared Catholic faith. Other disabled people who published memoirs in the 1930s such as John Gray’s Gin and Bitters describe only friendships and are silent on sexual intimacies.¹⁷

The numbers of disabled people writing about their lives grew exponentially in the 1960s, spurred by a wider growth of life writing, community publishing and the oral history movement.¹⁸ The increasing contestation of the marginalisation, abuse and control experienced by disabled people also sparked a rash of life writing, including by the 1980s many women, whose voices had been previously somewhat muted.¹⁹ Perhaps the earliest example of this more politicised mode of life writing was the pioneering collection of essays on the stigma of disability edited by Paul Hunt in 1966. This was an important book which marked the early phases of disabled-led campaigning in the UK. Paul Hunt received over sixty essays after an appeal in newspapers and magazines for contributions, and eventually published twelve.²⁰ All contributors had physical impairments, and most wrote about the effect on their intimate relationships and aspirations.

Hunt (1937–79) had a particularly sharp experience of social segregation. He turned sixteen in 1953 whereupon his access to care and education at Queen Mary’s Children’s Hospital, Carshalton ended abruptly. Becoming (as defined by the hospital administrators) an adult was an abrupt transition and meant immediate uprooting. Hunt’s muscular dystrophy and wheelchair use made it impossible for him to live at home; he was sent instead to the ‘chronic ward’ at St John’s Hospital, Battersea. As Luke Beesley and Tony Baldwinson document, this was a neglectful, hopeless environment in which chronically ill, mostly elderly patients were dumped.²¹ Disability was confused with ill-health, and many disabled ‘patients’ were unnecessarily confined to bed, or used as ward labour, feeding and dressing other residents without pay. The label ‘Young Chronic Sick’ was attached to anyone under sixty-five on these wards to distinguish them from geriatric patients, indicating the distorted age categories commonly applied to disabled people; one activist, Pamela La Fane, described it as ‘growing up geriatric’ in a newspaper exposé of her own experiences of nearly thirty years in a ‘chronic sick’ ward from age sixteen.²²

Hunt became a determined advocate for himself and others, managing to get released at age nineteen when he moved into Le Court, a home run by the Leonard Cheshire Foundation. In this adapted environment that claimed to provide a genuine home, Hunt continued to battle petty restrictions that tried to limit residents’ bedtimes and silence dissent. He embarked on a journalism campaign, advocating freedom to make life choices for disabled people in both the national press and Le Court’s own journal, the Cheshire Smile. In 1970, he married Judy Hunt, a former worker employed at Le Court; the couple moved into their own home and continued their joint involvement in disabled people’s activism.²³

In Stigma, Hunt included those born with disabling conditions and those who acquired them in adulthood. The latter had sometimes already established marriages, but these could not be taken for granted. Rosalind Chalmers, for example, was married with two children when she contracted polio in 1950. She became much more dependent on her husband and described her experience of illness as ‘nothing less than a second birth, another expulsion from the womb. … The iron lung [her respirator in hospital] contained its foetus’.²⁴ The cost to Chalmers’s marriage was evident, and she was painfully aware of husbands who simply walked away from disabled wives, while children were put into care. Her own husband, in her words, ‘had lost his wife, but she was not conveniently dead and buried. (“Daddy has three children,” said our daughter pertinently, “Me, Peter and Mummy.”)’. She moved into a nursing home in 1964 and described her marriage as ‘com[ing] to a full stop. Or it could be a semi-colon; we don’t know yet’.²⁵ Chalmers’s life demonstrated the uncertain or reversible age status of someone who was dependent on the care of others.

Louis Battye (1923–77) had been disabled his entire life, and his contribution to Hunt’s collection described his stark sense of detachment from personal intimacies: ‘The bitterest truth of all [is] that we are forever barred from the deepest and most intimate levels of human intercourse.’²⁶ Like others, Battye felt this to be an exclusion from the status of adulthood: ‘The congenital cripple … passes straight from the subworld of childhood to the subworld of the cripple.’ Battye’s own experiences of heterosexual contact were infused with emotional discomfort, with intimate relationships ‘inevitably containing a certain amount of pity and curiosity. … Bitterly he will begin to realise that he is in for the lonely, perverted life of the enforced celibate’.²⁷ This bleak assessment was characteristic of the tone of Stigma. None of the contributors found marriage straightforward, and came to it late or never. Marriage or intimacy between disabled people was not discussed – relationships were consistently framed in terms of contact between disabled and non-disabled (or ‘normal’) individuals.

The 1970s witnessed quite a sharp change in the tone of disabled people’s life writing. Earlier testimony about disability had been dominated by ideas of mental adjustment to be made by disabled people. Margaret Gill, a Stigma contributor, for example, described experiencing a twin disability of ‘the obvious disfigurement of body, and the hidden disfigurement of personality’.²⁸ In the 1970s, talk of suffering, isolation and disfigurement were replaced by more positive languages of pride, rights and revolutionary change. Paul Hunt was at the heart of this shift through his prominent involvement with the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), and his championing, alongside figures such as Vic Finkelstein and Mike Oliver, of the ‘social model’ that located disablement in the social environment rather than a medicalised or embodied condition.²⁹ Rights to marriage, sex and intimacy become more centre stage in disabled people’s activism, with Hunt arguing in 1970 that relationships provided leverage to disrupt the institutional order:

the emotional and sexual relationships which can arise in mixed [disabled and non-disabled] communities, particularly when accompanied by strong bonds of affection and commitment, are an anti-institutional factor which makes it more difficult for people to be controlled by authority. This problem has been the bane of more than one authoritarian or paternalistic administrator’s life.³⁰

At this point, however, Hunt was still keen to cast marriage as a route to emotional maturity for disabled people who had been institutionalised, rather than a right and legitimate expectation. An alternative approach that was more focused on practical fulfilment of sexual and emotional needs came from the ‘normalisation movement’, prominently associated with institutional care of people with intellectual disabilities in Nordic countries.

Normalisation

Ideas of ‘normalisation’ began to be voiced by those working with intellectually disabled people in the 1960s. Niels Erik Bank-Mikkelsen (1919–90) was closely involved in policy and voluntary action for disabled people in Denmark and pioneered their inclusion in all aspects of life. His approach, in opposition to medicalised approaches, was widely influential across Nordic countries. It helped shape the United Nations through its 1971 Declaration of the Rights of Mentally Disabled Persons, and was taken up in North America by prominent advocate Wolf Wolfensberger. Wolfensberger (1934–2011) insisted that service providers should use ‘culturally valued means in order to enable people to live culturally valued lives’. This would produce, he argued, personal competencies and positive social images to counter the low expectations and often unconscious devaluation of disabled people. Age appropriateness was stressed, with Wolfensberger noting the damaging stigma of being an ‘eternal child or child-once-again’. Devalued people, he argued, must be ‘in age configurations that match those in culturally valued analogues’.³¹ Normalisation advocates such as campaigner Ann Shearer strongly supported a ‘right to love’; if emotional and sexual needs are suppressed, she argued, ‘the position of the individual as an adult, no matter what his age, is apt to be tenuous’.³²

These ideas were promoted in the United Kingdom by a series of conferences organised by the Campaign for the Mentally Handicapped. ‘Our Life’ (1972) and ‘Listen’ (1973) were unusual in offering intellectually disabled people full delegate status and the chance to have a say in their lives. The approach was taken up by the more established and sedate voluntary action group Mencap in a 1974 pamphlet titled ‘Sexual Rights of the Retarded’. Mencap had originally been titled ‘The National Association of Parents of Backwards Children’ when founded in 1946; in 1955, reflecting updated terminology, it became the National Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. Its name was officially shortened to Mencap in 1969, but earlier stigmatising language and its well-known logo of a sad-faced child were incongruously featured on the ‘Sexual Rights’ pamphlet, suggesting institutional inertia when it came to cementing the shift away from paternalism.

Nonetheless, new thinking on ‘normalisation’ was foregrounded in Mencap’s publication. Its goal was to speed up the slow pace of change in the UK which still operated 1,000-plus-bed Victorian-built institutions that were notorious for their abuse and poor standards of care. Wolfensberger had worked in Britain in the early 1960s with Jack Tizard, and both helped sponsor culture change that led policymakers to begin to aspire to ‘home-like settings’.³³ But such ‘homes’ often remained quite segregative, leading disability activist Peter Townsend to talk of ‘fake normalisation’. Social and spatial segregation were particularly durable for people with intellectual disabilities.³⁴ Sex continued to be approached in terms of their sexual vulnerability or sexual threat to others. Nonetheless, the process of deinstitutionalisation opened up spaces for new approaches, documented within a spate of studies into sexually active and married couples who had been labelled ‘handicapped’.

Janet Mattinson (1927–2011), an influential social worker and from 1969 a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute of Marital Studies, published a study in 1970 that tracked marital relationships among former residents of the Royal Western Counties Institution (later Hospital) at Starcross, Devon. Finally closed in 1986, this institution still housed its full complement of 1,800 residents in 1970. Its long waiting list suggested that ‘care’ options for people with intellectual disabilities were still scanty. Mattinson’s study tracked thirty-two married relationships, mostly begun while one or both parties were resident at Starcross. While earlier studies of people with intellectual disabilities had focused on the cognitive status of their children, Mattinson was more interested in the quality of their intimate relationships. Unusually, she cited, in their own words, the views of those she wrote about. Drawing on the language of the normalisation movement, she also stressed social competencies and dismissed Intelligence Quotient (IQ) as a useful tool. Her portrayal of couples was warm, depicting them as sometimes combative with quarrels and physical violence, though couples were quick to make up. Tensions around adult status, however, remained even for those who had successfully achieved marriage. One couple discussed their relationship:

[Wife] I give him his credit, ’cos he’s a good boy really.

[Husband] I’m not a boy.

[Wife] Well, he is to me. Well, he’s not acting like a man, is he? He comes and gives me a hand if I’m busy. He never hits me, if we have a tiff – well, anybody do, don’t they?

[Husband] She treats me like as if I were her son at times … I looked a right idiot. I won’t go out with my missus, not very often.³⁵

This exchange is revealing of the behaviour and boundaries that conventionally cemented both gender and marital status; a husband who helped with domestic chores and did not hit his wife did not perform normative adult masculinity, even though a wife might be expected to be grateful. Both parties to this marriage were aware of the disruption of age-gender norms in their past lives and current relationship.

Inspired by Mattinson, a further study was conducted by Ann and Michael Craft in the late 1970s. Ann was a social worker at a relatively new and progressive Welsh ‘subnormality’ hospital, Bryn-y-Neuadd, and she had pioneered sex education and relationship support for residents. Her husband was a psychologist interested in research into sexual offending. From 1976, they surveyed forty-five couples where one or both had been deemed ‘subnormal’. They found a surprising degree of relationship success, with a voluntary break-up rate of 2 per cent. Given support, couples could successfully care for each other, though parents were sometimes very opposed and hospitals had on occasion instructed solicitors to safeguard the rights of over-twenty-ones to marry. The legal status of adult did not consistently govern family attitudes, though institutions were more willing than in prior years to safeguard autonomous choice-making. The Crafts were clear that relationships should be supported not because of any policy goals or cost implications but because it was a source of happiness to individuals.³⁶

The medical profession and wider public opinion continued to contest sex and marriage as features of normalisation; as one former staff member at Starcross recalled in the late 1980s, ‘the idea of actually having a room where people could go to be private, those sorts of issues. Well, what would the Dawlish Gazette say if they knew we were allowing this to happen? I thought to hell with what the Dawlish Gazette says! It was never resolved. It still isn’t resolved!’³⁷

The right to marry remained controversial; the Crafts’ study stimulated an extended rebuttal from Dr J. Oliver, a consultant psychiatrist, in the Journal of the British Institute of Mental Subnormality. He rejected the findings and methodology, arguing that the Crafts had over-emphasised successful marriages by their call-out for established couples, and thus created a false picture of competence and stability. His contact with children’s homes and Care Orders, by contrast, put him intimately in touch with children whose care had broken down through the cruelty and neglect that he associated with low IQ. Oliver felt that marital happiness was subsidiary to effective childrearing which remained the ‘most important aspect of partnership and marriage for the subnormal’. He continued to promote ideas of inheritability of intellectual impairment, and insisted that risks to children meant marriage was inadvisable. His beliefs reflect the strong resistance to ‘normalisation’, especially if this could be cast on grounds of child welfare.³⁸

Despite their optimism, both the Crafts and Mattinson recorded removals of children from couples who were deemed unable to care, as well as forms of contraception being imposed where consent was unclear, including sterilisation. As one participant told Mattinson: ‘Then they sterilised me and that was that. I didn’t want it; it was forced on me. I thought it over and I thought it over.’³⁹ Some women in Mattinson’s study were unaware that they had been sterilised, suggesting that consent was not clear cut. A 1981 memoir by Jamaican-born Pauline Wiltshire recalled being forcibly sterilised in Jamaica after she gave birth outside of marriage, as well as doctors in the UK who refused to listen to her preferences. Racism interacted with ableism in diminishing her adult status, and she was not permitted to raise her son; she recorded that even in her late twenties, when living in London, her mother ‘had beaten me like a child in front of other people not of my family. This hurt me very much emotionally, more than it did physically. If there had not been other people there I would have hit her back’. Both her family and statutory services were controlling and judgemental. Wiltshire concluded, ‘it’s as if my friends have become my family instead’.⁴⁰ Although there were successful experiences of parenthood as well as active choices to remain childless documented in these studies, ‘normalisation’ agendas delivered by care services proved compatible with sexual and reproductive control and coercion.⁴¹

Handidate

A more combative, subversive and rights-based approach among mobility-impaired people emerged in the 1970s. Paul Hunt reviewed the Swedish Fokus housing scheme, presented in the UK at the initiative of an early disabled-led campaigning group, the Central Council for the Disabled, in 1973. The Fokus scheme included the active participation of disabled people in planning, leadership and the ongoing life choices of residents. Flats rather than rooms were provided, close to city centres rather than in remote hospitals as had been so common in the UK:

An important aspect of the full-care service was the attitude of the staff. Fokus staff had to be open minded – for instance, on matters of sex – and must never treat the tenant as a patient. The handicapped person’s right to independence and to the management of his private affairs must never be infringed.⁴²

A third of Fokus residents were married or cohabiting, and practical assistance was given with sex if needed.

These radical arrangements echoed the BBC’s current affairs programme Man Alive, which also foregrounded issues around sex and disability. The programme had featured Pamela La Fane in her battle to leave the ‘chronic sick’ ward through three episodes broadcast in June 1968; she eventually was offered a remodelled council flat and lived independently, with the support of a live-in carer, for the rest of her life. La Fane chose to remain single, celebrating the companionship of her friends and her cat.⁴³ But in 1972, an episode directed by Paul Morrison and co-produced with the Mental Health Film Council and the charity Scope (then named the Spastics Society) featured the loving relationship between Willy and Margaret, cited at the outset of this chapter. They were depicted as normal lovers, through intimate, tender footage of washing each other’s bodies and sharing a bed. The episode revealed that group dormitories and brusque care regimes left little space for privacy, and parental attitudes made sexual relationships complicated. Scope supported calls for change – yet were inconsistent on sex and intimacy, issuing a film in 1973 which continued to maintain that for people with cerebral palsy, ‘realising that one is not attractive to the opposite sex is a real and difficult problem’.⁴⁴ As a branch-led organisation, judgemental and objectifying beliefs continued to feature at some levels of the organisation, even as change was attempted at others.

Man Alive hosted a studio discussion of the issues raised, and foregrounded disabled people insisting on their rights to marry and live together. They also gave space to the conservative views of a consultant psychologist, Joshua Fox, who continued to maintain that residential care was not compatible with intimate freedoms: ‘how much freedom can be allowed?’, he asked, and forecast that if any resident was granted more choice, all would demand it. Fox was proved correct. In 1976, a disabled couple, Maggie and Ken Davis, heavily involved in UPIAS, were housed in an accessible flat in the Grove Road housing scheme, Nottinghamshire, Britain’s first independent living (later renamed ‘integrated living’) project. The couple had faced steep opposition. Despite being married in 1974, they were refused permission to share a bed in Maggie’s ‘Young Chronic Sick’ unit (located in a geriatric hospital) in Grays, Essex.⁴⁵

In the same year that Maggie and Ken Davis moved into their flat, medical doctor and tabloid agony aunt Wendy Greengross published a National Marriage Guidance Council report, Entitled to Love: The Sexual and Emotional Needs of the Handicapped. Greengross cited Swedish and Danish precedents for ‘normalisation’, to include marriage, sex aids, pornography and paying for sex. She was also involved in an initiative titled ‘Sexual Problems Of Disabled People’ (SPOD) to facilitate sex and intimacy by providing sex aids.⁴⁶ This wider landscape of intimacies envisaged and sought among disabled people is evident in the well-used dating services for disabled people that emerged in the 1980s, as well as disabled people’s participation in mainstream dating. A reader’s letter to Singles magazine was designated ‘letter of the month’ for its ‘wonderful news’ about the success of a service named ‘Disdate’. Londoner Fred Brown wrote to describe his courtship, through Disdate, with a partially sighted woman from Gravesend; they were now engaged and expecting a child. Brown did not disclose anything about his own ability, but did cautiously note that his partner ‘might not be the girl of my dreams’ but was ‘the love of my life’.⁴⁷

Specialist disability publications also took up dating. Disability Now, a widely read monthly newsletter published by Scope, advertised a dating agency, Handidate, which promised to find penfriends and partners for disabled people. Disability Now also hosted ‘find-a-friend’ listings; the adverts were extremely varied. Unusually, many stressed (or sought) the possession of transport or being a car driver. Cars provided private, intimate spaces for those who often lacked privacy; the status of being a driver was another indicator of adulthood. The adverts also differed from those typical of the non-disabled in giving more details of relatives, such as: ‘Man with disabilities, early forties, with elderly mother, wishes to contact lady also disabled, in the Leicestershire area. Preferably a single person with an invalid car.’⁴⁸ Complex forms of dependency were visible in the listings, revealing a less individualistic and more open-ended sense of intimacy and relationship-building among disabled people.

Limits to change

Ideas of marriage and sexuality for disabled people had rapidly transformed, and the 1970s were a period of optimism over innovative support options in the community. There were still, however, clear limits to the ability of disabled people to be seen as sexually active adults, and the form their sexuality could take. Normalisation campaigners had perhaps been too optimistic about how easily ‘normal’ life could be taken up. Lives deformed by institutionalisation were not easily made compatible with adult intimacies. Born in 1925 and judged ‘mentally defective’, David Barron’s memoir of his institutionalised childhood included experiences of sexual abuse. Barron was released from institutional confinement in 1955. He courted and married a woman, but could not consummate the marriage and it was annulled. In his 1996 memoir, he disclosed deep anxiety about his own apparent paedophilic desire. After three suicide attempts, he opted for chemical castration by stilbestrol (or DES) as a means of expunging his libido.⁴⁹

The warmly supportive 1979 study by Ann and Michael Craft still used language of sexual deviancy, noting a range of ‘sex offences to which subnormals are prone; namely child sex offences, exposure, and homosexual offences’.⁵⁰ It is striking that the very concept of ‘normalisation’ was still so easily paired with its stigmatising converse, ‘subnormal’. Ideas of sexual threat remained present in much commentary, and it proved especially difficult for sexual minorities to gain social acceptance. ‘Normalisation’ all too easily lent itself to heteronormativity. Ideas of environmentally induced same-sex preferences were often referenced to explain and trivialise same-sex activity within single-sex hospitals and institutions. The Crafts, for example, were confident that all residents would prove heterosexual: ‘we have been surprised how rapidly homosexuals evidenced heterosexual behaviour once their single-sex hospital closed, and they entered the new bisexual [i.e. co-residential] unit’.⁵¹ Minoritised sexual preferences were thus subject to policing and attempts at ‘reform’, or dismissed as ‘environmental’. Individuals internalised ideas of sexual conformity. As Elsa, a contributor to the 1981 Images of Ourselves collection of life writing by disabled women, put it, ‘I felt a bit absurd about being gay and disabled’.⁵²

Elsa’s greater openness about her sexual preferences may have come from her involvement in the women’s movement, which by the 1980s had a strong component of activist groups for disabled women. She was a member of Gemma, a group of disabled and non-disabled lesbians. Through groups such as Gemma, the Liberation Network of People with Disabilities and Sisters Against Disablement, women’s voices became much more prominent in debates about intimacy. Feminist analysis of disabled women’s experiences and vulnerabilities had been distinctly lacking in much of the 1970s reformist social policy and media productions. Man Alive’s 1972 episode, ‘Like Other People’, for example, featured without comment the breezy, objectifying statement from a disabled man that ‘There was this bird up in Worcester, decent bitch she was, Christ … I reckoned I could marry this bird’.⁵³ Studies of relationships among intellectually disabled people in the 1970s took little interest in the violence disabled women disproportionately experienced in relationships. Echoing the controversial views of domestic violence reformer Erin Pizzey, Janet Mattinson saw both men and women as violent and held that the partner who ‘usually sets up and invites the violence is often as much of a protagonist as the partner who is finally charged with assault’.⁵⁴ As Beckie Rutherford has charted, disabled women’s groups of the 1980s began to challenge patriarchal attitudes and foregrounded disabled women’s sexual agency, as well as calling out the abuse they suffered.⁵⁵

The momentum of activism around inclusive sexualities in the 1980s was not secure and suffered reversals. In October 1987, Disability Now’s agony aunt Margaret Moran described what she termed the ‘double stigma’ of homosexuality and disability. She cited testimonies from queer disabled people who, at a SPOD conference, had narrated being shunned by family and institutions for identifying as gay or lesbian. Moran was supportive of inclusivity, though she noted cautiously that ‘the present legal situation’ made it very difficult for carers, and ‘the dividing line between helping young people to be fulfilled and taking advantage of, or abusing, them is a very fine one indeed’.⁵⁶ Her caution may have resulted from the differential age of consent for male same-sex and cross-sex relationships until equalisation in 1994. The tense atmosphere was crystallised by the Thatcher government’s attack on sexual minorities, codified in the notorious Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act that prohibited ‘promoting homosexuality’ in print or education settings. The Gay Men’s Disabled Group’s chairman wrote to Disability Now, welcoming Moran’s attention to sexual diversity but rejecting her focus on stigma. It was an irony, the correspondent acknowledged, that despite his pride in being gay, he was not able to reveal his name.⁵⁷ The 1995 Disability Discrimination Act did not mention rights to marriage or a family life; these elements of ‘intimate citizenship’ were first formulated in the 1998 Human Rights Act. A 1996 study still noted a ‘conspicuous silence’ on sexual matters in disability activism; SPOD was dissolved in 2004, with the director complaining that disabled groups had not prioritised intimacy and sex, preferring to focus on housing, mobility and employment.⁵⁸

Conclusions

Uncovering the history of intimacies for disabled people is worthwhile in its own right, helping to offset the erasure and forgetting that this minoritised population has often been subject to. It also offers valuable insights into the fluidity and contingency of the status of adult, spanning a twentieth century during which sex, intimacy and marriage were privileged and prominent vehicles for its status. Both in terms of subjective experience and in institutional or structural dimensions, ‘othered’ and devalued forms of embodiment and cognitive status were widely experienced as a destabilising force that meant adulthood was precarious and precious, removed from its taken-for-granted status by the ‘time warp’ of disability.⁵⁹

Marriage, usually cast as heterosexual and sexually consummated, became a practical and symbolic means of asserting adulthood that was widely available to an increasing number of Britons in the twentieth century. Marriage also became increasingly unstable and subject to dissolution as divorce rates increased sharply from the early 1960s, though the campaigning of sexual minorities for full marital rights in the 1990s and 2000s suggests that it has regained social centrality in the twenty-first century.

Disabled people, particularly those with intellectual impairments, experienced obstacles to sharing the privileges married status brought. Their sexual desires and needs for intimacy were often ignored, judged deviant or only approached in terms of reproductive potential. Non-disabled commentary swung from denial of sexual desire to a hyper-focus on fertility as a social danger. Disabled people’s adolescence, a key time for sexual experimentation, was often curtailed, and many transitioned straight from childhood to adulthood, or to other statuses such as ‘dependant’. ‘Adultification’, a term that developed in critique of racist categorisation, is also relevant to disabled people’s experiences. Designation as ‘adult’ sometimes imposed heavy burdens onto disabled children and adolescents.⁶⁰

If married, many disabled people experienced negative judgements, lack of support and intrusive surveillance. They could not easily afford the marital discord and breakups many non-disabled couples began to experience from the 1960s. Despite conflict, disabled people’s marriages were often too valuable to relinquish. Their experiences suggest that for disabled people, experiences of ‘life course’ were contextually specific rather than linear, capable of seemingly going into reverse, or into hyper-acceleration, as they navigated institutions, cultural templates and social environments. Ideas of second or eternal childhood problematised adulthood.

These subversions and fluidities should be understood as histories of power, in terms of boundary-setting practices, resource allocation and statutory labelling. But disabled people sometimes experienced the unusual pace or flow of their lives as liberating or a source of wonder and pleasure. It lent itself to a radical rethinking of value, relationships and the passage of time. Time might productively slow down, or be experienced more intensely, ‘in the moment’. Being accepting of care and dependency might help subvert the accumulative or directive temporalities of relationships, education, personal finances and careers. While the social model of disability has understandably kept discrimination and prejudice in the foreground, the ‘social landscapes’ of disability are more diverse. Disability histories can document a wider range of emotional experiences and forms of resilience, as well as innovative forms of intimacy that decentred marriage, heterosexuality and penetrative sex.

Notes

1. 1. Thanks to Alice McKimm, Victoria Moreland, Caroline Rusterholz, Beckie Rutherford and Zoe Strimpel for generously sharing sources and ideas with me; I’m also grateful to the participants at the Royal Historical Society’s workshop, ‘Breakups in Britain’, for debating the themes of this chapter.

2. 2. ‘Like Other People’, Man Alive, dir. Paul Morrison, screened on BBC television in 1972 and winner of the Grierson award for documentary, 1973, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-like-other-people-1972-online, accessed 14 August 2023.

3. 3. Julie Anderson, War, Disability and Rehabilitation in Britain: ‘Soul of a Nation’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Joanna Bourke, ‘Love and Limblessness: Male Heterosexuality, Disability, and the Great War’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 9, no. 1 (2016): 3–19; Mike Mantin et al., Disability in Industrial Britain: A Cultural and Literary History of Impairment in the Coal Industry, 1880–1948 (Manchester University Press, 2020).

4. 4. George Thomas, A Tenement in Soho: Or, Two Flights Up (London: J. Cape, 1931), 206.

5. 5. Louis Neville Battye, I Had a Little Nut Tree: A Reconstruction of Childhood (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959), 93–4.

6. 6. Simon Jarrett, Those They Called Idiots: The Idea of the Disabled Mind from 1700 to the Present Day (London: Reaktion Books, 2020). Julie Livingston’s comparative research concluded that this was true of less industrialised societies. Julie Livingston, ‘Insights from an African History of Disability’, Radical History Review 2006, no. 94 (2006): 111–26.

7. 7. Clémentine Beauvais, ‘Ages and Ages: The Multiplication of Children’s “Ages” in Early Twentieth-Century Child Psychology’, History of Education 45, no. 3 (2016): 304–18. On the longlasting presence of ableist eugenic assumptions about reproduction, see Laura Kelly and Caroline Rusterholz, ‘Depo-Provera, Medical Authority and the Domiciliary Family Planning Services in Glasgow and Haringey, 1970–1983’, Historical Journal, forthcoming.

8. 8. Erika R. Katzman, Elizabeth Anne Kinsella and Jessica Polzer, ‘ “Everything Is Down to the Minute”: Clock Time, Crip Time and the Relational Work of Self-Managing Attendant Services’, Disability & Society 35, no. 4 (2020): 517–41.

9. 9. Reginald Ford, ‘Quite Intelligent’, in Paul Hunt, ed., Stigma: The Experience of Disability (London: G. Chapman, 1966), 39–40; Jo Campling, ed., Images of Ourselves: Women with Disabilities Talking (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 87.

10. 10. 13th Board of Control Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1927), 43, 41, 42.

11. 11. Tom Shakespeare, Dominic Davies and K. Gillespie-Sells, The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires (London: Cassell, 1996); K. Gillespie-Sells, Mildrette Hill and Bree Robbins, She Dances to Different Drums: Research into Disabled Women’s Sexuality (London: King’s Fund, 1998).

12. 12. Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution, 1st ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Teri Chettiar, ‘ “More Than a Contract”: The Emergence of a State-Supported Marriage Welfare Service and the Politics of Emotional Life in Post-1945 Britain’, The Journal of British Studies 55, no. 3 (2016): 566–91.

13. 13. Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 23.

14. 14. Selina Todd and Hilary Young, ‘Baby-Boomers to “Beanstalkers”: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-War Britain’, Cultural and Social History 9, no. 3 (2012): 460.

15. 15. Hannah Charnock, ‘Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England, 1950–1980’, The Historical Journal 63, no. 4 (2019): 1–22.

16. 16. There is little published literature tracing the historical relationship between life writing and disabled status, with the exception of Mantin et al., Disability in Industrial Britain.

17. 17. Thomas, A Tenement in Soho; John Gray, Gin and Bitters (London: Jarrolds, 1938).

18. 18. Ben Jones, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia: Autobiography, Community Publishing and Working Class Neighbourhoods in Post-War England’, Cultural and Social History 7, no. 3 (2010): 355–74.

19. 19. See, for example, Campling, Images of Ourselves; Jenny Morris, Able Lives: Women’s Experience of Paralysis (London: Women’s Press, 1989).

20. 20. Judy Hunt, No Limits: The Disabled People’s Movement – A Radical History (Manchester: TBR Imprint, 2019).

21. 21. Paul Hunt, Collected Works of Paul Hunt, edited by Luke Beesley (Manchester: TBR Imprint, 2020).

22. 22. ‘Michele Gilbert’ [Pamela La Fane], ‘Growing Up Geriatric’, The Guardian, 23 December 1966, cited in Pamela La Fane, It’s a Lovely Day, Outside: An Autobiography (London: Gollancz, 1981).

23. 23. Hunt, No Limits.

24. 24. Hunt, Stigma, 20.

25. 25. Rosalind Chalmers, ‘Victim Invicta’, in Hunt, Stigma, 22, 21.

26. 26. Battye, ‘The Chatterley Syndrome’, in Hunt, Stigma, 9.

27. 27. Hunt, Stigma, 12, 13–14.

28. 28. Margaret Gill, ‘No Small Miracle’, in Hunt, Stigma, 106.

29. 29. Hunt, No Limits; Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan Education, 1990).

30. 30. Paul Hunt, ‘Observations on Planning a Home for Spastics’, The Architects’ Journal Information Library (May 1970), in Collected Works, 125.

31. 31. Wolf Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas, ‘The Principle of Normalization in Human Services: A Brief Overview’, Research Highlights 2 (1982): 14, 18. On the wider context, see John Welshman and Jan Walmsley, Community Care in Perspective: Care, Control and Citizenship (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

32. 32. Ann Shearer, A Right to Love?, vol. 1972 (London: Spastics Society and National Association for Mental Health, 1972).

33. 33. Ann Shearer, Normalisation?, Discussion Paper 3 (London: Campaign for the Mentally Handicapped, 1972). For an experiment in implementation, see ‘Richard’ and ‘Cathy’s’ engagement and marriage documented in D.G. Race, D.M. Race and Department of Health and Social Security, The Cherries Group Home: A Beginning: [Helping the Mentally Handicapped Look after Themselves] (London: HMSO, 1979).

34. 34. Townsend, cited in Alan Tyne, ‘The Impact of the Normalisation Principle on Services for the Mentally Handicapped in the United Kingdom’, Research Highlights 2 (1982): 24–34.

35. 35. Janet Mattinson, Marriage and Mental Handicap (London: Duckworth, 1970), 137.

36. 36. Ann Craft and Michael Craft, Handicapped Married Couples: A Welsh Study of Couples Handicapped from Birth by Mental, Physical or Personality Disorder (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).

37. 37. Viv McAvoy, Nursing Officer, ‘Starcross Hospital: What the Voices Tell Us’ (2020), 40, https://citizen-network.org/library/starcross-hospital.html, accessed 2 July 2023.

38. 38. J.E. Oliver, ‘Partnership and Marriage for the Subnormal?’, Apex: Journal of the British Institute of Mental Handicap 22, no. 42 (1976): 31–2.

39. 39. Mattinson, Marriage and Mental Handicap, 104. See Elizabeth Tilley et al., ‘ “The Silence Is Roaring”: Sterilization, Reproductive Rights and Women with Intellectual Disabilities’. Disability & Society 27, no. 3 (May 2012): 413–26.

40. 40. Pauline Wiltshire, Living and Winning (London: Centreprise, 1985), 34, 62, 44.

41. 41. Hilary Brown, ‘ “An Ordinary Sexual Life?”: A Review of the Normalisation Principle as It Applies to the Sexual Options of People with Learning Disabilities’, Disability & Society 9, no. 2 (1994): 123–44. Caroline Rusterholz notes the growing interest of sexual and reproductive health clinics in the needs of disabled people from the 1970s: Responsible Pleasure: Youth Sexuality in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).

42. 42. Paul Hunt, ‘Fokus Housing Scheme, Sweden’, minutes for Central Council of the Disabled, June 1973, in Collected Works, 144.

43. 43. La Fane, It’s a Lovely Day, Outside.

44. 44. The Management of Work Centres, Scope/Heron Film Productions, 1973.

45. 45. Maggie Davis and Ken Davis, To and From Grove Road (Manchester: TBR Imprint, 2019).

46. 46. W.F.R. Stewart, ‘Sexual Aspects of Disability: Growth of Attention in the UK’, Royal Society of Health 98, no. 1 (1978): 36–39. SPOD’s approach was later criticised as ‘mechanistic’ and devised for, rather than by, disabled people. Shakespeare, Davies and Gillespie-Sells, The Sexual Politics of Disability, 29, 99.

47. 47. ‘Wonderful News’, Fred Brown, Singles magazine, June 1984, 4.

48. 48. Disability Now, October 1987, 15.

49. 49. David Barron, A Price to Be Born: My Childhood and Life in a Mental Institution (London: Mencap Northern Division, 1996), 122.

50. 50. Ann Craft and Michael Craft, ‘Partnership and Marriage for the Subnormal?’, Apex 3, no. 2 (1975): 13–15.

51. 51. Craft and Craft, Handicapped Married Couples, 124.

52. 52. Campling, Images of Ourselves, 86.

53. 53. Man Alive, 1972.

54. 54. Mattinson, Marriage and Mental Handicap, 138. On Pizzey, see Zora Simic, ‘From Battered Wives to Domestic Violence: The Transnational Circulation of Chiswick Women’s Aid and Erin Pizzey’s Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear (1974)’, Australian Historical Studies 51, no. 2 (2020): 107–26.

55. 55. Beckie Rutherford, ‘Disabled Women Organising: Rethinking the Political Within British Liberation Movements, 1976–1998’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2023).

56. 56. R. Moran, ‘Homosexuality and Disability a “Double Stigma”’, Disability Now, October 1987, 14.

57. 57. Disability Now, January 1988, 2.

58. 58. Shakespeare, Davies and Gillespie-Sells, The Sexual Politics of Disability, 6. The 2005 Mental Capacity Act clarified the legal status of decision-making by individuals with intellectual disabilities in questions of marriage, but tensions remained in balancing safeguarding and ‘personalisation’. Anna Arstein-Kerslake, ‘Understanding Sex: The Right to Legal Capacity to Consent to Sex’, Disability & Society 30, no. 10 (November 2015): 1459–73.

59. 59. Pam Evans, cited in Jenny Morris, Pride against Prejudice: A Personal Politics of Disability (London: Women’s Press, 1991), 144.

60. 60. See Jack Hodgson’s chapter in this volume.

References